To open up Labour, win Makerfield

In the latter part of the 1950s, Labour’s right wing believed that the advent of television - and the party political broadcast in particular - increasingly meant that the party did not need an active membership. “With the increasing penetration of the mass media”, wrote Anthony Crosland, “the traditional local activities, the door-to-door-canvassing and the rest, are largely a ritual”.

By the time he wrote that, Labour’s 1959 election result had already proved that view to be mistaken.

The party’s right moved to a strategy of removing members’ rights within the party, rather than removing the members themselves. The set piece battle of 1960-1 over nuclear weapons was one that the right sought as much as the left, to openly defy a conference decision so that “the policy-making role of the conference would be to some extent devalued”, as Crosland put it.

Historian Lewis Minkin notes that: “In December 1955, when Gaitskill became leader of the party, its concept of intra-party democracy, in which policy in theory flowed upwards via the party’s conference, was still a cherished symbol”. More symbol than reality, because the platform always won conference votes then; but, since the unions ceased to be always-reliable supporters of the parliamentary leadership, a war against the idea of control of the party by its membership and that of the affiliated unions has gone on for decades.

The Labour base has pushed back at times, particularly in the late 1970s to early 1980s, but, from the top, that war has brought in the National Policy Forum to undermine the policy role of conference, restrictions on CLPs’ rights to select their own parliamentary candidates, and the current high (20%) threshold for MP nominations for someone even to be a candidate in a leadership election.

Labour’s membership has been falling again since its most recent peak of just under 600,000 in 2017, which was a big leap from the 150,000 or so in 2009. Some of that loss is through expulsions, but the vast majority is members heeding Starmer’s 2023 message, “If you don’t like the changes that we’ve made, I say the door is open, and you can leave”. In ones and twos, members have been dropping out every day since - some to the Greens, a few to Your Party, and far greater numbers to nowhere in particular.

But now LabourList reports after the May NEC: “Labour officials have seen a jump in party membership since Andy Burnham emerged as a possible contender in a future leadership contest”.

In my own CLP, membership has increased this month for the first time in that period, and I have met others who report the same in their areas too. It’s small, but it’s an about-turn.

In Makerfield on Saturday 6 June, the number of party members engaged in “traditional local activities, the door-to-door-canvassing and the rest” for the by-election were high. The whole constituency has already been door-knocked, and my team were speaking with many people who had already spoken with a Labour canvasser. By lunchtime on Saturday, already over 300 people had gone out from the campaign base in the Stubshaw Cross Labour Club. Those figures are close to the numbers in Gorton and Denton at its very peak.

Anecdotally, the figures include left-wingers who have previously dropped out of Labour Party activity, or have even been expelled from the party.

Change

At the campaign’s launch, Burnham spoke to party members about a vote for him being a vote to change the Labour Party”. “My own party needs to change - a vote for me in this by-election is a vote to change Labour - to be a party that is solidly on the side of working-class people and working-class communities”.

I have heard several canvassers talk about doorstep conversations where a voter says they want to vote Reform because they hate Starmer, and the canvasser has pointed out that the quickest way to get him out is to vote Burnham. The election material we are putting through doors says simply “Vote Andy”, with the word “Labour” relegated to a small logo on the back. This is not a campaign based on “Labour’s record in government”.

At the launch, Burnham presented a case that government has been on the wrong course for four decades. Implicitly disavowing the Blair government (and his own part in it), he spoke about the damage done by successive privatisations, and called for more council housing (“the biggest council housing building programme since the Second World War”), for “care on NHS terms”, and improved public transport.

Presenting the Greater Manchester Mayoralty as an example of an alternative approach, he contrasted the £2 bus fare anywhere in Greater Manchester to the £364 fare from Wigan NW to London.

Sources including Socialist Worker have referred to Greater Manchester buses as being in “public ownership”. They are not - they are owned by companies such as First, Metroline and Stagecoach, and franchised to Transport for Greater Manchester. The Manchester trams are owned jointly by Keolis and Amey, franchised to Metrolink. So when Burnham very carefully refers in public interviews to “public control” rather than “public ownership” he is being accurate, unfortunately.

Campaign Group MP Clive Lewis very accurately skewered the difference, speaking at the May “Organising Forum” of the soft-left group Mainstream. “Public control is what we already have with water; what we need is public ownership”. Interestingly, that meeting discussed questions such as how to hold a future Burnham leadership to account if he becomes leader.

On the BBC’s “by-election special” Question Time, Burnham presented the alternative his mayoralty represents rather differently, as politics that was “problem-solving”, “long-term”, and “collaborative”. In a response to an audience member asking him directly what changes he would make to the Labour Party, he ducked the question.

He said nothing about Labour Party democracy, made no mention of Labour conference policies such as wealth tax, and said nothing about the importance of trade unions as organisations and in the Party. Instead he just said that he wanted to “change politics such that it works for here”. His focus on “collaboration” is much more in line with the Compass electoral alliance “pluralism” of “Mobilising the Progressive Majority”.

However, Burnham has spun the bus franchising and other local policies as an alternative to “40 years of Thatcherism” and he does help us open up discussion of the record of Labour governments and of alternatives.

Democracy

If Labour win this by-election, and if that success is followed by a Labour leadership election - neither is certain - then we have a chance to open up space within the party on party democracy, on tackling Reform, and on taxing the rich. There is little doubt that if Labour’s NEC had not blocked Burnham from Gorton and Denton, Labour would have won that by-election, and Reform’s growth would have been somewhat paused.

We hope that the Campaign Group of Labour MPs put up a “left candidate”, as they did with Bell Ribeiro-Addy for last year’s Deputy Leadership election. The moment that they do so is an opportunity for left activists to propose support for that candidate in trade unions, union “Labour Link” committees, CLPs and Labour Party branches. They can call on their MPs to nominate that candidate.

Even before that, such activists can propose that those same bodies demand of the NEC that rules are operated fairly this time, rather than with a repeat of last year’s NEC invention of an “MPs’ stage”, preventing CLPs and trades unions from even nominating anyone who has not already passed the MP nominations threshold.

The desire to remove Starmer goes well beyond the left, and well beyond Burnham’s centre. Catherine West MP’s 9 May threat to trigger a contest if no-one else came forward to do so reflected a feeling very widespread across the party. Many MPs and party activists who saw so many councillors lose their seats on 7 May because of voters’ dislike of Starmer want a change of leadership, but with no significant change to party democracy or policy, or even with a policy shift to the right.

There is no certainty about Makerfield. This by-election involves taking on Reform at their peak. Polls show a lead for Labour, but one very close to the polls’ margin of error of that polling, and dependent on the Restore vote not collapsing into Reform.

If Labour win in Makerfield, Reform will have been pushed back at their height, in a constituency where they were by far the winners in the local elections. Opportunities will open up within the Labour Party. If Reform wins, the indictment of Starmer will be even stronger, but the chances of it producing an opening-up or shift to the left much smaller. Readers who are able to go to Makerfield should do so.